It couldn’t be a coincidence. Supposedly there was no such thing as a coincidence. And, if it had been most of the other women he’d casually dated in the past, he’d say it was somehow a deliberate ploy to get to his heart through his stomach by way of a sandwich that made him think of home, family and love.
But Paige wasn’t like any of the women he’d casually dated in the past, and he couldn’t imagine her playing that kind of silly game. Which meant he was enjoying the company of—and having the best sex of his life with—a woman who also happened to make perfect fried bologna sandwiches.
That wasn’t good at all.
“Your girlfriend’s here.”
Ryan’s words had Mitch picking his head up and looking before his brain could send out the message to play it cool. Sure enough, Paige’s car was pulling up the drive, and he grabbed the T-shirt he’d tossed on a pile to mop some of the sweat off his face as she parked next to Ryan’s truck.
Once the initial boost his system got from seeing her faded, a low buzz of annoyance hummed through him. Showing up at his home unannounced crossed a boundary. The boundaries were fluid and he hadn’t spelled them out exactly, but he hadn’t thought he needed to.
She looked pretty, though, with her hair up in a ponytail and her Trailside Diner T-shirt hugging her curves in a way that made his hands itch to take its place. He walked out to meet her in the drive, and she smiled with her gaze firmly on his chest.
“You’re all hot and sweaty,” she said.
“Sorry.” That’s what happened when you dropped by uninvited while a guy was working.
“Oh, I wasn’t complaining.” She walked around to the passenger side of her car and grabbed a basket out of the backseat.
“Um…” If his “girlfriend” had brought him a picnic lunch, Ryan was never going to let him live it down.
“Is Rose inside?”
“What?”
“Rose. Is she inside?” She held up the basket. “Mrs. Dozynski asked me to bring some plum pierogi up to her.”
“Really? Plum?” He tried to peek under the cloth covering the top of the basket, but Paige slapped his hand.
“Mrs. Dozynski said you can’t have any. And neither can Josh.”
Now, that was just mean. “Mrs. D’s pierogies are almost worth firing Andy for.”
“She said you’d say that and she also said it’s too late, so don’t bother.”
She started to walk past him, but he hadn’t quite wrapped his mind around what was going on yet. “So you didn’t come to see me?”
“I wasn’t even sure if you’d be here. I ran into Mrs. Dozynski at the library and she was upset because she made these special for Rose, but both Dozer and Lauren were too busy to drive them out to her, so I volunteered.”
“Oh.” He stared after her as she carefully made her way up the stairs and went inside. So she wasn’t there to see him. That was a good thing.
He went back to work, thankful but a little surprised that Ryan didn’t rib him about Paige showing up, and then blowing him off. Maybe hearing Lauren’s name was enough to shut him up. Sometime very soon he was going to have to get to the bottom of the Ryan and Lauren situation. Lauren had married Ryan’s best friend and had a kid and, at some point, Ryan had stopped coming home on a regular basis. Though he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what, Mitch was pretty sure there was a connection there.
When they’d put in another half hour of work and Paige still hadn’t come out, Mitch declared it break time and grabbed his shirt. As gross as it felt, he pulled it on before he walked in the kitchen door. Rosie had rules about people running around her home not fully clothed.
Paige was sitting at the kitchen table with Rosie, a glass of iced tea in front of her, and they were both laughing. They stopped when they noticed he’d come in, which he had to admit gave him a little bit of a complex.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he said, walking over to the fridge and hoping Rosie had made a fresh batch of lemonade, strike or no strike. He knew she’d been cleaning on the sly because toilets didn’t scrub themselves, but he wished she’d worry a little less about shower scum and a little more about the fridge and pantry.
“Rosie was telling me about the time Liz talked Katie into cutting her hair short so she could get onto the baseball team.”
He laughed at the memory as he settled for a soda from the fridge. No lemonade, dammit. “The entire thing was a mess. To start with, we all played for the team already, so I’m not sure how she was going to explain a fifth Kowalski boy.”
“A troubled cousin from the city who’d been sent to live with Uncle Frank and Aunt Sarah in the country is what I was told,” Rosie said.
“Yeah, that was gonna work in this town.”
Paige laughed softly and Mitch’s fingers tightened around the soda can. In the kitchen of the place he called home, laughing with the woman who was like a mother to him, Paige looked as though she belonged. It felt like she belonged.